BRING BACK HUAC:

September 11, zero hour, the day the US shook and the world trembled.: Two years on, the president might be nuts, but not all of America’s gone crazy (Lawrence Donegan, 07 September 2003, Sunday Herald)

A GREAT deal will be written this week about the mindset of post- September 11 America, but it’s a safe bet that few commentators will notice that on the second anniversary of the awful terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC, the best-selling book in the United States, Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair And Balanced Look At The Right, written by a comedian called Al Franken, begins with the following paragraph: “Although I write this book in the spirit of dispassionate inquiry, I cannot expect my critics to respond in kind. My right-wing detractors will doubtless tell you that I’m an ‘obnoxious [phallus]’, a ‘smug ass[...]’ and a ‘clear and present threat to our national security’. I will not stoop to dignify such calumny with a response, except to say that Condoleezza Rice should watch her mouth.”

Franken’s book is important; not because it’s hilarious – though it is – and not because it provides endless source material for anyone seeking to make the case that George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and John Ashcroft are responsible for the most disastrous US administration since Nixon’s – though it does. No, Franken’s book is important because it is a smash hit.

In the past 10 days, 75,063 Americans have shelled out $24.95 for 377 pages of Al Franken at his anti-Bush, anti-Rice, anti-Republican, anti-Fox News (which, incidentally, tried and failed in court to stop the book being published) best. This is especially noteworthy in this week of all weeks, when it will be said countless times in television studios and newspaper comment pages that the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers marked the birth of an uglier America – a case made almost universally in Europe, and to a lesser extent in America itself by such disparate souls as the internet gossip-peddler Matt Drudge (on the libertarian right) and the actors Tim Robbins and Johnny Depp (on the liberal, Hollywood left).

The phrase du jour is “the new McCarthyism”, a neat journalistic inflection which casts post-September 11 America as a country where freedom of speech and political dissent are no longer tolerated. Franken’s wonderful book and the reception it has received from the US public suggests that a snappy journalistic turn of phrase and the complete picture aren’t always compatible.

That's an awfully gentle way of saying that the journalistic/Leftist inflection about a "new McCarthyism" is a big, fat, lying lie. To the extent though that the folks telling the lie would seem to be trying to associate themselves and their opposition to the War on Terror with the American Communists and fellow travelers of the 40s and 50s, they are telling the truth.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 7, 2003 10:51 AM